Pittsburgh Public Schools expects enrollment in city high schools to drop nearly 25 percent in six years as a wave of enrollment losses in the early grades reaches the high schools.
City high schools enroll 8,105 students, a number that is projected to fall to 6,111 in 2014-15. If not addressed, the decline means costly overstaffing and maintenance of underused buildings that could "most likely destroy" the district, said school board President Theresa Colaizzi.
Facing a budget surplus that could be gone by 2012, the school board is asking parents and community groups for ideas to boost enrollment at underused high schools. One idea is to keep high school buildings open by making more of them grade 6-12.
A committee has recommended closing Peabody in East Liberty as a comprehensive high school and converting it into a grade 6-12 International Baccalaureate magnet. School Superintendent Mark Roosevelt will make his own recommendation on Peabody in the next few months.
Getting input from the ground up is a marked difference from how the district dealt with surplus space in schools about three years ago. At that time, Roosevelt made recommendations and asked the public to react to them.
"You don't expect everyone to agree with school closings, but we can build a process where the community can wrestle with some of the issues the district has to wrestle with and come up with solutions that make sense," said Carey Harris, a mother of three children and executive director of A+ Schools, a community group that works to improve the school district.
The school district, for example, has been holding public hearings in Homewood to get input on what to do with Westinghouse High School, projected to have only 109 students by the fall of 2014. One possibility is converting it into a grade 6-12 school with an emphasis on sports or another special focus.
The school district is reluctant to close Westinghouse because it was renovated in 2002 at a cost of $25.8 million.
"That makes it worth our time and the community's time to really investigate potential uses of the building," Roosevelt said.
Next fall, the district will open University Prep, a grade 6-12 school that is a partnership with the University of Pittsburgh, at the former Milliones school in the Hill District.
By then, Pittsburgh will have 16 schools that serve either high school students only or high school students with other grades. The district estimates that between now and the fall of 2014, four high schools -- Langley, Oliver, Peabody and Westinghouse -- will have only 100 to 200 students each.
A recent junior varsity game of Westinghouse's girls' basketball team was called off after a player fouled out because there were too few players on the team, Roosevelt said.
"If you have 300 kids at a high school, you can't field the variety of activities kids want," Roosevelt said.
The school district has averted tax hikes by dipping into its operating surplus in five of the past six years. The surplus has shrunk from a high of $98.2 million in 2003 to $48.1 million with last week's adoption of the 2009 operating budget of $525.3 million.
With no further changes, the district's surplus would drop to nearly $26.1 million by the end of 2010. By 2011, it would plummet to $1.5 million if the district does not change the way it does business, said Christopher M. Berdnik, the chief financial officer.
During its biggest round of school closings, the district saved $14 million by closing 22 schools. Berdnik said the savings came from cutting a principal, a quarter of the staff, but mostly through utilities.
The administration can avoid some of the rancor that accompanied the 2006 closings by getting more input from parents and other residents, Harris urged.
"No one likes to lose schools in their community," she said. "That's why we advocated a community process to deliberate about the next round of changes, especially as they relate to high schools."
Colaizzi said the anticipated decline may not materialize if The Pittsburgh Promise, a $250 million scholarship program for graduates of the city's public schools, works. The goal of The Promise is to boost academic achievement and stem the loss of students from the district.
Roosevelt said the district cannot allow the loss of high school students to hurt the finances. He has adopted a policy of requiring cuts in school operations equal to enrollment declines.
"It is something that obviously demands to be dealt with," Roosevelt said. "It means there has to be consolidation."
